Small earth working machinery for use on farms, cottages and the like such as tractors having wide front-end buckets or loaders are well known. Various known types of tractors include a narrower backhoe bucket extending rearwardly away from the tractor which dig and scrape by being drawn toward the tractor. The backhoe bucket is useful in applications not readily accomplished using the wider front-end loaders such as digging narrow trenches and working around tree trunks and the like. In general, tractors provided with both a backhoe digger and a front-end loader are more expensive than tractors provided with front-end loader alone. Another drawback to this type of tractor is that an operator must adjust his or her seating 180 degrees in order to utilize the backhoe digger.
Tractors having a standard backhoe digger alone attached to the front end of the tractor are known but provide a device of reduced utility with the front-end loader being absent. A further disadvantage of this type of tractor is that the backhoe digger usually has a cutting edge having an orientation which is fixed with respect to the rest of the tractor so that when the tractor is on a slope, the backhoe digger enters the ground at an angle to the horizontal equal to the angle of the slope on which the tractor is sitting.
It is known that earth working vehicles may be modified to provide dual function attachments to the front end of the vehicle. U.S. Pat. Ser. No. 2,863,233 discloses a bulldozer comprising a standard wide front-end loader or bucket with the bulldozer modified to include a narrower front-end trench digger pivotally mounted to the side wall of the front-end lobe for digging narrower and deeper trenches than achievable with the standard front-end bucket. A drawback to this type of device is the trench digger is large and opens in the same directions as the front-end loader and therefore not suitable for certain applications such as working around tree trunks.
Accordingly, it would be advantageous to provide a backhoe bucket which can be readily attached to, and detached from, a front-end loader of a tractor so that the backhoe bucket may be utilized by an operator without having to rearrange his or her seating. Further, it would be advantageous to provide a means for adjusting the orientation of the backhoe digger with respect to the terrain to be worked.